Dark Side of Capitalism

Sadly capitalism does have its danger. The problem is that the honest pursuit of profit in business can be over taken by greed. When this happens the results can be as bad as any totalitarian system, this takes two main form exploitation and cronyism.

Exploitation occurs when the owner and managers of a business stop seeing employees as people and starts seeing them only as resources to be used. This can take the form of unreasonably low wages with long hours and us safe working condition. The presents of any of these three in a job dose not exploitation make. A job may have low wages simply because the job is not worth much. Long hours are a necessity of many well paying jobs, and some work like mining is inherently dangerous. However it is combination of all three that add up to exploitation

The worst form of exploitation is the sweet shop where all three exist in abundance. Furthermore in the case of sweet shops workers are housed in company dormitories and forced to by necessities from an over priced company store. This condition reduces the workers to little more than slaves.

Cronyism is where business and government become closely related to the point where a business can use the government against competitors. This occurs when a prosperous business starts giving money to candidates for elected office to get favors in return. These favors some time take the form of favoritism in getting government contracts. However these favors often take the form of government regulation that helps put the favored business’ competition out of business or at least make it harder for them to compete.

The worst form of cronyism is a big business being bailed out by the government; while there smaller competitors are allowed to go out of business. This even worst when as in the case of the 2008 economic collapse the companies that got bailed out are the same companies that caused the problem to begin with.

While capitalism is not with out its problems it is still the best and freest economic system there is. With capitalism is the largest possible portion of a population can become prosperous. The United State is prime example of this where even in economic bad times the poorest among us are still among the richest people in the world.